Rule 53

by Elaine Nolan

  “God, you can be a right bitch sometimes,” Leigh commented to Nathan.

  “Another family trait then,” he shot back.

  “And I thought you were slippery,” Adam commented to Leigh, who laughed in reply. “What’s it like to be the other woman?” he asked.

  “Not my first time,” she answered, surprising them. “Which is why I now have a rule about never getting involved with men who are spoken for.”

  “Spoken for,” Tom laughed. “Now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a while.”

  “But you are spoken for, are you not?” Leigh put to him, stopping him in his tracks as he got back in the car, and he found her back to that hard and inscrutable mask.

  “That depends on how you look at it,” he retorted, wondering how she found out.

  “There’s only one way to look at it,” she answered him.

  “And if you broke that rule?” Adam ventured.

  “Then I’m using you and looking for something,” she answered.

  “Good to know,” Adam said.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not something either of you will ever have to worry about,” she said, quashing Tom’s fantasies further as he sat in. To distract himself, he contacted the rest of the squad to update them. With Nathan’s disappearance from the cemetery, the fire fight ended quickly with casualties on both sides. The Irish injured were attending the nearest Emergency Room for treatment, the rest remained on standby for the return part of the plan, and Tom set that in motion. He pulled back into traffic and took the most direct route back to the Embassy.

  “Why did you leave it there?” Leigh asked Nate, playing with the pendant. She found the catch and it revealed the micro-USB connection within its core. Her expression told him it impressed her with its cleverness.

  “I had that made before I discovered she had another agenda. That’s how I found out she’d been snooping through my things. She found that and thought it was a gift for her. I was still enamoured by her and I said nothing, and I figured it was safe leaving it with her.”

  “Huh. I wouldn’t have figured you were that easily distracted by women.”

  “He’s a man, we’re all easily distracted, given the right circumstances,” Adam admitted. “Even you achieve it sometimes, although your methods are more… unique.”

  “Me?” she asked, surprised and he turned in the passenger seat to face her.

  “You don’t remember that dress you wore to his charity thing? I had to leave the room, damn thing was so tight on you I could hardly breathe,” he told her.

  “I didn’t have a problem with it,” Tom said.

  “I did,” Nathan confessed, “but it didn’t stop her from using it while she worked the room.”

  “I think that was Donal’s goal when he picked it,” Adam said.

  “It worked,” she defended. “Sort of. Didn’t get me close to McGregor.”

  “No, you just turned up on his doorstep instead,” Tom said.

  “And shot me to get his attention,” Nate accused. She grinned at him.

  “Saved your arse though,” she retorted.

  “Given my current predicament, that’s still debatable.”

  “We can still hand you over to Swayne,” she taunted.

  “Now that I have the drive and key…” but he stopped as she shook her head.

  “We have the drive and key,” she corrected him. Adam sat forward again, exchanging an amused look with Tom at the sibling snipping, and deciding to stay out of it.

  CHAPTER 60

  The SUVs arrived at the Embassy within seconds of each other, but Tom waited until everyone arrived before exiting the vehicles together in a coordinated re-entry to the Embassy. Once inside, Adam handed Leigh the hard drive and she disappeared to the Crow’s Nest to start work on it. Tom caught hold of Nathan and escorted him up to the first-floor meeting room where they’d questioned him previously.

  “Now what?” Nathan asked. Back in the embassy's safety adrenaline was fast disappearing and he hit a wall of exhaustion.

  “Statement time,” Tom told him. “We have to preserve the chain of evidence, or at the very least, document how we came upon the hard drive, and you need to give us more details about how you got it.” Nate just sighed but allowed himself to be manhandled. Not that he had much choice in it, and at least it wasn’t Leigh and her alternative methods.

  “The ex-girlfriend we encountered? How likely is she to go to the DC Police?” Tom asked

  “Not likely. She knew that pendant wasn’t meant for her, and she was only acting on the instruction of her precious Congressman. She won’t report us in case it implicates him.”

  Tom started the official interview, hitting the record button on the recording device, stating the date and time and advising Nathan of the purpose of the statement. It sounded like an official caution.

  “Am I under arrest?” Nate asked.

  “Not yet,” Tom answered. “That will depend on what she finds on that drive, otherwise I will arrest you for putting this embassy and staff in danger.”

  “She’ll find everything you need.”

  “For your sake you’d better hope she’s as good as she thinks she is. Let’s take this back to the very beginning; what initiated the drive?”

  “I plugged it into the server and the drive initiated on its own.” Tom was unimpressed with the smart answer.

  “What events led you to deciding to create a backup on that hard drive? And for the record, you’re not her so stop trying to be a smartarse,” he taunted. Nate sat back and sighed again, tiredness dragging him down, and he wondered if this was the cop’s tactic, to bombard him with questions while in this weakened and vulnerable state. It was a good tactic to use on a guilty man, where tiredness led to mistakes in retelling the story, in remembering the minute details during the cross-examination, and Nate knew that would be the next step in this interview. He sighed again, but stretched, tried to work the tiredness out of his muscles, and ready himself for the next few hours of fun with Tom.

  CHAPTER 61

  He grew up in a damaged society, spent his formative years in a city filled with hate, anger and suspicion. He had his bleak world view confirmed as he watched a man, who he discovered was his father, murder his mother. Granted, he now knew the truth, but at the time he refused to listen or believe any narrative that differed from the story he told himself of what happened.

  He felt guilt. Guilt in being saved when she wasn’t. Guilt at not being able to save her himself. He was angry at his own impotence and inability to defend her against the men who’d terrorised and tortured them, and the hardest part to swallow was the torture was only a means to an end, a trap set to ensnare one man. That anger, that righteous rage at how meaningless, how inconsequential their lives were, pushed him, fuelled him. And righting that wrong became his passion, his cause in life.

  He hadn’t told Leigh everything about his brief time with their father. Yes, there’d been several slaps given, growing in strength each time, but only in response to Nathan’s fist-flying tantrum. But Lee walking away from him, as though giving up trying to get through to the boy, affected Nathan more. The withdrawal hit Nathan the most, another loss to add to his overwhelming grief. He calmed down, broke down, no longer able to hold everything inside; the anger, the grief, the fear. Lee held him, tighter than anyone ever had before, or since, and in his father’s arms he cried, he howled, he wrung every emotion he had. Then the real conversation began between them.

  Lee told him everything, why he’d been in the North, how much he’d loved Nathan’s mother, but the men he saved his son from, were similar to the men who’d threatened to kill them all if he hadn’t left. All Lee was trying to do was stop a war, or at least, play his part in ending it. He didn’t try convincing his son he was a good man; he let his stories and actions do that, and in Nate’s young eyes the dark shadowy father figure transformed into a man with superpowers, worthy of a cape.

  And he was gone again as quickly a
s he’d appeared, leaving behind a broken, unfulfilled promise to be a bigger part of his life. Granted, death inconvenienced those plans, but Nate wasn’t to know that until much later, but their brief time together changed him. Lee’s sense of fairness and justice imprinted itself on his son, continued to define him, to shape his view of the world and steer his life. Unlike what befell his younger sister.

  On first discovering he had a sister, and after reading that file on her, he considered her spoilt and weak, and had nothing but disgust for her inability to deal with the hand life dealt her. Unlike her, he believed, he used the trauma of those formative years to step into the cape, and climb up to that pedestal he’d placed his father on.

  Okay, he now realised the lies he’d told himself, the versions of the truth they had told him, and he had willingly accepted them. He now knew the cape never belonged to him. If it were to belong to anyone, it would have been Leigh’s, and knowing her, she’d scoff at it, look down on the very notion of it with the disdain he now knew it deserved.

  But at the time he held onto the narrative of the angry, abandoned boy, because it was an easy fuel for his cause. He perfected the telling of the story, used it to convince people of his drive, of his passion. It was convenient, and useful, the Derry boy, snatched from impending death by rogue dissidents, and now championing the way of social inclusion, of community, of peaceful coexistence. Too bad it was also naïve and misguided.

  McGregor appeared in his life within a year of his arrival in America, a kindly old man with memories and news from Nathan’s old life and a life he still missed. Nathan’s funny, often indecipherable accent got him bullied at high school, until he learned to defend himself and started working out. McGregor’s influence started there, in getting him membership and a personal trainer at an exclusive gym, getting him a speech coach to overcome the thick brogue. While he never lost it, the coaching helped him soften it enough to be understood when he spoke, and still sound exotic and mysterious and, to his teenage embarrassment, attractive to women. The old man helped with that too, getting him and Mark another coach, one to help in social etiquette, and the embarrassment and awkwardness around girls transformed into charm and charisma.

  Matt was a new friend in a new world, and again, the introduction came through the old man. He was the first real friend Nathan made. Like him, Mark had been displaced and for similar reasons, but from a different part of Northern Ireland, and from opposite ideologies that would’ve divided them if they’d remained back home. McGregor threw the boys together, not in any dubious way, nor did the old man conduct himself to cause alarm or concern, or a subsequent police investigation, but he encouraged their education, opened doors for them, and introduced them to the right people. Or wrong ones, Nate now mused with the benefit of hindsight.

  Nathan wanted to do something good with his life, something worthwhile, something epic. He wanted to make people’s lives and living better. He wanted to build a world where prejudices were consigned to history, where religion was open to robust discourse, not the cause of strife, where class difference was confined to school rooms. How fucking naïve and stupid he’d been, to think he could save the world. Maybe he should’ve started small, like Lee did, and save one boy, one scared kid at a time, and he realised Leigh had on that doomed military exercise.

  Rebuilding America after the climatic, environmental and geological upheavals became every civil and social engineer’s dream, and every affected city, town, state in the country desperately needed robust solutions to the resultant housing and agricultural crises. People needed somewhere to live, somewhere to regrow food, but a crisis of this magnitude also required sensitivities around social and cultural diversity.

  Swayne had argued for this inclusion in gaining access to Europe, but the EU and other nations could only offer so much, America would have to help herself if she wanted to survive. Nathan wanted America to more than survive, he wanted her to thrive, to regain her place in the world. She had embraced him, gave him sanctuary and a place to call home, gave him the space and the opportunity to become a man. He wanted to repay her in kind, and the old man saw the potential in his spark of an idea, helped him build on it, develop it, and fund it in small start-up projects that gained Nate traction and growing interest from the right investors. Or the wrong ones, maybe. By then, Garret was on board, part of the team. And what a team.

  Matt brought the legal expertise, Garrett the construction and architectural part. Together they brought a new way of social and community based thinking to housing and residential projects. Together they were the future of social inclusion and a new way of living.

  Or at least, that’s what it was supposed to be. Over time the old man used it, twisted it. He set them up with his own projects where that ethos slipped. Where Nathan’s ethos slipped. It was something he couldn’t live with, didn't want to live with.

  That’s when the old man started getting heavy-handed and left him out of key meetings. Nate only found out after they were long finished. Mark and Garrett stopped feigning embarrassment at his exclusion. Then his signatures showed up on documents he’d never seen, never mind signed. That’s when he knew he was in trouble. That’s when he took action. That’s when he broke into the old man’s server room and copied what he could.

  CHAPTER 62

  “I need to log our latest adventure with DFHQ,” Adam said, and she hesitated.

  “Don’t send it,” she said, receiving a worried look in return, knowing he had no choice. They’d taken part on an unsanctioned exercise, where both Garda and army personnel sustained injuries. “What I mean is hold off on sending it until after I’ve found something, some evidence to justify our course of action. It might be enough to remove the threat of disciplinary action against us or scathing write-ups on our personnel files.” He paused.

  “It’ll take me a few hours to document and write this up,” he admitted. “And I need to get the medical records of our injured from the hospital, and that can take ages to email. Thankfully, we’d no fatalities, or we’d have no choice but to report it.”

  “That should give me enough time,” she said.

  “If I get any grief on the delay, I’m just going to blame you.”

  “Wouldn’t be my first time either.”

  “I’m now understanding why you’re not considered a team player. You always bend the rules like this?

  “No, sometimes I make the rules up entirely,” she answered and he laughed.

  “You know Tom will give him a hard time. You’re not sitting in?”

  “Nate’s a big boy, and this is his mess,” she answered, but Adam sensed more. He let it drop, he had his own dragon to slay in the mountain of paperwork he now faced, and wondered if the venture would be worth the subsequent administrative work.

  “I guess we’ll be busy for the next few hours,” he concluded, and left her.

  She showered, taking her time and allowing the jets of hot water pound her skin, letting the heat soak into her bones. Her thoughts wandered to Lee. Would he have taken such dangerous and reckless action? Would he have risked everything for someone he barely knew? It was a fool’s path to tread, but she felt she knew the answers, that she acted in the way he would have. It was a comfort, albeit a small one to know she’d kept Nathan alive, just as Lee had all those years ago. Now she just had to find out if it had been worth the effort.

  Back in her now comfortable service field uniform she connected the hard drive to the systems and ran an anti-virus suite against it, isolating it from the network. Not that she didn’t trust her brother, but she didn’t trust him, and didn’t trust the source of the information.

  The hard drive was free of any nasties, and she connected the encryption key, applying the same meticulous care to its contents. There was only the sub-routine to unlock the hard drive, but she wasn’t prepared to take any chances, knowing the calibre of people and coding she’d escaped from, or their efforts to disrupt DFHQ’s network.

  With both
devices coming back as clean she accessed the main servers and saw that Tom had activated the recording device in the interview room, saving it to DFHQ’s secure cloud environment. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t tempted to stream the live recording, to listen in to the conversation with Nathan, but she knew the greatest pleasures often came from delayed gratification. That wasn’t her lesson, but Jürgen’s. He had been the master of that, among other areas, and he excelled in the art of withholding a climax until it became the ultimate release, but only after she’d worked for it, suffered for it, sacrificed everything for it.

  She pushed that memory aside, or at least tried to, but McGregor’s mention of him plagued her thoughts. More than plagued, it haunted her. She’d left Jürgen behind when she finished college in Germany and left that lifestyle behind. She never saw or spoke to Jürgen again, except for that one time he appeared in Carlow.

  The hotel she had a financial interest in found themselves short-staffed and she volunteered to put in a shift at the bar when he appeared, stopping her in her tracks. He’d not received a warm welcome from her. Now her own past seemed to be returning to bite her on the ass. While she found any ass-biting pleasurable, this had the hallmarks of something more serious, more sinister, even prosecution-able, and she didn’t like it.

  McGregor’s comment about being of use to them troubled her, but the only thing she could think of was her coding projects. She’d been meticulous in vetting those, only taking on the ones that seemed legitimate. She pushed it to the back of her mind. It was a puzzle for later, when she had time to dwell on it. Now, she had Nathan’s puzzle to play with.

  With both devices showing as virus free, she accessed the drive, checking the properties and access information, finding it had only been used once. A quick check of the folder properties confirmed the date they were copied to the drive. As part of the procedure to preserve the evidence, she took screenshots of the drive and folder properties, and saved them should anyone try to accuse her of tampering. She repeated the same procedure in every file she accessed. It made the process slow and laborious, but with lives hanging in the balance, it paid to be this careful.